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Now the great event is over, the long and bloody conflict around Ladysmith has been gloriously decided, and I take a few days' leisure on the good ship Maine, where everyone is busy getting well, to think about it all and set down some things on paper.
It was a night alarm magnified by imagination into a desperate sortie from Ladysmith, and a correspondent of the Diggers' News telegraphed his version of the affair in glowing terms to that paper, giving full details of things that never happened. A copy just received in camp causes much amusement. Reference to my notes for the 19th of last month will show that we were at perfect peace here.
Facilities are to be accorded to the Association to put up tents at fixed stations, as far as military requirements will permit. How well the work of the Association has been done has been told in the organ of the S.C.A. News from the Front. It was Lord Roberts' special wish that two of the iron buildings should be erected at Bloemfontein and one each at Kimberley and Ladysmith.
The Landman's Drift column had moved towards Dundee, the Rorke's Drift column had pushed some distance towards the west, and the forces from Albertina had showed the heads of their columns on the Natal side of the passes. The British force was divided between Dundee and Ladysmith. The Biggarsberg range, the cross-line of the A, is about fifty miles long.
How brave to save a fallen comrade or officer! One of our chaplains relates that in the advance to Ladysmith an officer was struck down and could not be moved.
Fourteen thousand Transvaalers under Joubert, who had first tested the cutting edge by sending a coal truck through the tunnel at Laing's Nek and who suspected an ambush when he found it clear, were moving south on Newcastle, while six thousand Free Staters under Martin Prinsloo were pouring through the Drakensberg passes west of Ladysmith.
The result was to save Ladysmith, or rather what was most really important to save the organized force that was there shut in.
And then gradually the rifle fire died away also, crackling more faintly as White withdrew to Ladysmith. At eleven o'clock Carleton's column recognised that it had been left to its fate. As early as nine a heliogram had been sent to them to retire as the opportunity served, but to leave the hill was certainly to court annihilation.
But at present, if those twenty-five thousand Boers opposite to us were not there now, they would be riding all over Cape Colony, and if Buller were not to keep on hammering away here a good many of them would be off at once. They say Ladysmith can hold out for another three months.
He had already missed an opportunity of co-operating with the main advance by a westward movement from Ladysmith to Van Reenen's Pass along the railway to Harrismith, where the presence of a division of the Natal Army would have been of the greatest use.
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